We’re revisiting our blog archives and republishing pieces that remain as timely as ever. This post was originally published in September 2015.

One way where this might come up at work…

A team is “left to its own devices” for many years, used as a dumping ground for staff who are being moved on, there is little or no recognition for their work – apart from when things go wrong (then they really hear about it).

A new manager is appointed and intends to “make things right”. She goes about articulating roles, holding people to account and managing performance.

Team member(s) feel aggrieved and share stories about what a bully the new manager is.

Victim-Rescuer-Persecutor Paradigm

Originally known as the Karpman Drama Triangle (Karpman, S (1968) Fairy tales and script drama analysis Transactional Analysis Bulletin, 7(26)) this model is intended to show the destructive relationships that can emerge when people are in conflict. Karpman chose the phrase “drama” as he intended to focus on the perception that people can end up playing certain roles – often unknowingly. He does not and I do not deny that there are actually “real” victims. This model is about the impact of perceptions, and the influence of those perceptions on our behaviour.

In this model, there are 3 roles, the Victim, the Persecutor and the Rescuer. The roles are not static and can shift between different people and back and forth between roles. Typically, the situation commences when a particular person takes on a Victim role. All roles play a part in keeping this unhelpful dynamic in place.

We’re revisiting our blog archives and republishing pieces that remain as timely as ever. This post was originally published in September 2015.

Karl Weick’s 1993 paper The Collapse of Sensemaking in Organizations: The Mann Gulch Disaster is an analysis of a notorious incident in 1949 in Montana, USA. The disaster centred on a team of firefighters attempting to contain an out-of-control forest fire in a gulch located along the upper Missouri River. Tragically, the fire claimed the lives of 13 firefighters.

Reading through the story, I can’t help but be affected by the torment that would have been faced by those people in fighting the fire. While it’s possible to read through the events dispassionately in the safety of a cosy office, a historic anecdote from the dim past, for some reason tragic events like these can stick firmly to our consciousness. This particular tragic event is one of those for me.

Not all of us will directly experience a crisis like this, but all of us will experience a crisis of some kind from time to time. Crisis stories are part of the shared language we use to make sense of the world.

Recently I had the good fortune to talk to people working in an organisation and affected by a crisis, within days of it happening. A serious road accident involving a number of vehicles, lives being threatened and impacts on a major arterial road – the organisation was called to coordinate the immediate response. Talking to the people involved, their overriding sense was that the teams involved, from very different parts of the organisation, worked together “like clockwork”. But there was also a frustrating and lingering question: “why isn’t it always like this?”

What is it about a crisis that focuses our attention so fully for a short period of time?

I meet a lot of leaders who talk about their capacity to lead their teams by example. It’s one of those phrases that just sounds right. “Leading by example” connotes getting amongst it and relating to people in a simple, accountable, down to earth way. However, it can have quite disparate meanings depending on who you ask. Most recently, the answers I’ve heard are that leading by example is about:

Being able to build trust and influence with staff as you go about your work

Being hands on and helping staff with practical issues

Demonstrating respect and otherwise working positively with others

Being consistent in what you expect from staff

Trust, practicality, respect, and consistency are all worthy goals for leaders to pursue in their relationships with their staff, their peers, and with everyone they encounter in the workplace (not to mention their broader lives). However, it’s telling that there’s not often a common thread in what leading by example means to people. People tend to be quite confident that leading by example is a thing that they do, and my experience is that there isn’t much of an awareness of different interpretations. The main commonality is that everyone’s quite sure that everyone else understands what they mean by it.

That’s pretty worrying. If we assume that others are not the same page about something as common as this, how can anyone be sure about what example they’re setting, let alone whether they’re leading and communicating with others effectively?

So what should we talking about when we talk about leading by example? Walking your talk sounds like bluster or fluff if you can’t pin down that talk. That’s where the problem lies. For some leaders, saying they lead by example inadvertently becomes a way of not communicating effectively and not operating at the right level of work (see our levels of work article for more information on this).

While talking to a client in a government organisation recently, I realised how sloppy I am when talking about onboarding and induction programs. For the sake of clarity (I love clarity!) a few definitions:

Recruitment: the broad process of attracting and selecting people to join an organisation

Selection: choosing a single candidate for a role (part of a selection process)

On-boarding: the process of integrating an individual into an organisation, whether this is based on skill development, cultural norms and beliefs, or systems and process knowledge

Induction: the process of informing a new employee about an organisation’s policies, systems and procedures (part of an on-boarding process)

I’m not an HR professional, despite LinkedIn assuming I am, so please excuse the lack of convention. These are definitions I find helpful and I’m not suggesting this is “the general consensus” or an “industry standard”. (By the way – a topic for another time – what do you think when people throw in those phrases?)

I want to focus on on-boarding because it’s often relegated to the “we strongly intend to look into this in the next financial year” pile. Looking at an on-boarding process can provide a window into the health of an organisation. When I’m helping an organisation improve, I look at an on-boarding process as evidence for:

In short, our programs are different because they are relevant, practical, sustainable and proven.

Lots of organisations have previously invested a lot of time and money on leadership development. That programming might have given people a good set of skills and it might have built team cohesion – or the results might not have been commensurate with the investment. There’s nothing wrong with cohesive teams and improved skills, but these things aren’t that useful if the leadership development wasn’t ultimately geared towards improving results. Without a common language, toolkit, and framework for leadership that everyone uses and knows works, the results will fall flat.

We work to genuinely help our clients solve their problems and we tailor our programs to meet their specific needs. The programs are different to anything else available as they are very tightly connected to what the organisation wants to achieve. Each program begins with the senior leadership presenting the context of what’s happening in the organisation at the moment and how the program is connected to what our clients want to achieve as a whole.

We help our clients to succeed by looking at the impact of how they’re leading. What we do doesn’t just fall out of a textbook or a pet theory: every model is based on our hands-on experience in industry. We equip participants with problem-solving tools that work and show them practical examples of success.

It’s tempting to go and tackle lots of little changes. However, without a clear plan, those changes don’t cohere or stick. We work with clients to clearly map out where they would like to be by helping them to design the desired future state for their organisation.

What do organisations and individual participants get out of our leadership development programs?

At the start of the program, we ask participants what their expectations are. For many people, expectations are pretty low – they’re just there because their boss has sent them, they’ve done training before, they don’t think they’ll get much out of this. These participants, without exception to date, have a completely different response at the end.

Our programs are unique because we don’t just teach theory and send participants back to the workplace to find their feet. We actually won’t pass or accredit someone unless they’ve made improvements in their area of accountability at work, demonstrated against specific targets that are aligned with the organisation’s business plans. As a result, we’re being inundated with requests from previous clients to come back and run more programs.

In financial terms, one participant in one course alone has saved $1.5M in the first year as a result of better inventory management.

We’ve developed a 5 Tier Leadership Development Program. What are the tiers, how do they work, and how do they connect?

Organisations tend to have several leadership tiers, with different needs, challenges, authorities, and accountabilities. We don’t believe in ignoring these differences recycling generic, inapplicable programming. We believe in meeting people where they’re at and providing practical help and learning. Just like an organisation has several levels, our program is pitched and tailored for different organisational levels.

Each level increases in complexity in terms of understanding an organisation:

Leading in the Frontline (Essentials) is designed to develop more effective frontline leaders by providing some basic training in terms of leadership and expectation-setting

Leading in the Frontline (Advanced) is designed for current and potential frontline leaders believed to have the capacity, capability, and desire to progress to higher organisational levels. It addresses the expectations of a leader and basics of management processes, with the opportunity to gain some accreditation towards a Certificate IV in Leadership and Management

Leading for Change (Essentials) is geared towards the current middle management group, team leaders, and supervisors, with the opportunity to gain the Certificate IV Leadership and Management. It focuses on driving sustainable improvement, validating skills and utilising targeted interventions to build an engaged and energised team

Leading for Change (Advanced) is most suitable for senior managers and is focused on creating a constructive culture in which team members can work to their full potential. There is the opportunity to gain a Diploma Leadership and Management

Leading Transformation is designed for senior leaders, focusing on whole of organisational transformation and long term business improvement. Participants have the opportunity to gain an Advanced Diploma Leadership and Management

The program goes all the way from picking different units of competency that go towards making up a qualification to an Advanced Diploma. The Certificate IV, Diploma, and Advanced Diploma in Leadership and Management are all nationally recognised qualifications and there are a number of units that are mandatory for each.

There is flexibility built into the program to tailor it specifically to an organisation’s needs, with electives that we help clients choose to tailor the programs towards specific areas of focus, such as financial aspects of the business or more diagnosing issues with productivity and performance.

Clients approach us with a number of different ideas about what’s happening. Perhaps they’ve identified the culture as a problem, or safety, or something else entirely. We keep digging down and asking “how do you know that’s the problem?” Often, this process leads to our clients realising that at the bottom they actually have a leadership issue. We say that leadership creates the culture and it’s the culture that delivers the results – good or bad. If you want to improve the results or tackle the symptoms of the problem, you need to look at the impact of the culture and the leadership.

We run our leadership development programs because we enjoy helping people to become more deliberate and effective leaders.

It’s an old standby to say that you’re passionate about making a difference, but there’s little more satisfying then helping create positive change and helping others to do the same. It’s a wonderful feeling when clients come back to us and tell us that they’ve been implementing changes themselves. We’re keen on organisational improvement, not just ticking a box. As Sam Robinson says, ‘we want the organisation to succeed and we want people to succeed’.

We enjoy working with people and are fascinated by the intricacies of organisations, especially improving them. We come from a number of different sectors (such as law, manufacturing, and safety). We also work across a number of sectors, such as resources, manufacturing, local government, heavy industry, and not for profit, ranging from small to very large. There’s no limit to the sort of organisations we work with.

Peter White worked for many years in manufacturing and saw lots of money spent on training without delivering a significant return. He wants to make that ‘a positive experience with a positive return for each client’. Sam likes to foster ‘organisations that help and support people to achieve their best’. We’ve all been in organisations where the leadership was not very good and the culture and results suffered: we like helping people discover why leadership is so critical to that equation, positively or negatively. Here’s what our clients are saying: